Put local women's groups at the center of UN Women, Ms. Bachelet

UN Women is well positioned to help do justice to the countless on-the-ground grassroots groups in the developing world that are well-run and making real long-term impact for women and their families.

I’ve had the privilege of working with over 300 grassroots organizations in east and southern Africa in my career. Most were linked to local churches, schools, or clinics or were independent groups made up of countless local volunteers, mostly women, that assist other women and children by extending support and services into areas that are not sufficiently reached by government or international organizations.

WEM Integrated Health Services in Thika, Kenya is one such women-led, local grassroots organization. It was formed in 1998 by three committed Kenyan women who wanted to contribute to building a community-rooted response to HIV and poverty. WEMIHS offers care, educational support, and other services to vulnerable children, caretakers, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

This home-grown, grassroots-up organization is doing incredible work--not only reaching many families with quality services but also ensuring genuine community capacity and ownership of programs. I admire WEMIHS' founders very much and this organization is exactly the kind of local organization that transforming families’ lives in the long-term and is deserving of much more recognition and funding.

It's local women and activists that are the true heroes and the true experts about what's needed at the community level to fight poverty, or gender violence, or AIDS, or climate change. And it’s local women's organizations that are vital to supporting demand-driven development that can genuinely challenge power asymmetries and unleash social change.

UN Women is in a unique position to help hold donors and governments accountable to what proportion of aid funding directly reaches women, families, and communities and to ensure a smooth flow of funds to support effective, indigenous, community-level initiatives. Therefore, UN Women would do well to keep focused on getting existing and effective women’s groups like WEMIHS the resources that they need to address their own priorities.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Lentfer
Bruning, Nebraska U.S.A.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------As the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women officially begins its work this month, World Pulse is asking women worldwide: What is YOUR vision and recommendation for UN Women? We invite you to raise your voice by writing a letter to UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet outlining your recommendation for how this new UN agency can truly affect change on the ground to promote gender equality and uphold the rights and needs of women both on a local and global scale. Learn more: http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire/programs/international-violence-agai...

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Thank you for participating in this campaign, by using your voice and speaking out for women of Africa, and being a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves. Your letter is so powerful!

In the coming weeks, we will compile your letters and share your voices with the GEAR Campaign, who have been working closely with UN Women to ensure the inclusion of civil society groups, and through the PulseWire community, grassroots women leaders, as they set their agenda. We will also be sending your letters directly to Michele Bachelet and other senior leaders of the newly formed UN agency, to demonstrate the effectiveness for sourcing opinion, knowledge and needs from the global grassroots women's movement through our online community. Through this, we hope to open a portal for our community to have a direct line of influence within the UN Women agency.